


Secondhand Smoke

by dirtbag



Category: Dorohedoro
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Unresolved Romantic Tension, i love them….. i love them…… when will they kiss for real, magical shotgunning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-26
Updated: 2017-09-26
Packaged: 2019-01-05 15:35:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12192696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtbag/pseuds/dirtbag
Summary: They sure do this a lot, for something that's so endlessly frustrating.





	Secondhand Smoke

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in five seconds and its so foolish and overwrought but im feeling a lot of things atm. shoutout to frida for walking into my house and introducing me to dorohedoro, killing me instantly

The cut is nothing serious. In fact, Shin doesn’t even realize he has it until after the battle is done, when he spits on the corpse of a particularly irritating adversary and discovers that there’s quite a lot of blood mixed in. 

Forearms and torsos litter the carpet of the cramped apartment that he and Noi have found themselves in at En’s behest. There’s a mirror hanging on the wall near the kitchen, filthy but undamaged in the scuffle, so Shin turns to it and uses one finger to pull down on his lower lip. He inspects the cut as best he can through the layers of grime; it’s shallow but wide, and he’s sure it’ll sting once the adrenalin wears off. 

Noi glances over at him. She’s on the other side of the room, bagging up the last groaning pieces of the guys they’d just murked with her mask pushed halfway up her forehead. 

“Alright, senpai?” 

Her voice is cheerful, and sort of hoarse; she’d gotten even more fired up than usual while they were fighting today. 

“Yeah,” Shin says, averting his eyes from the mirror and pulling another black garbage bag out of his suit pocket. “Just a cut in my mouth. No big deal.”

Instead of just returning to the task at hand the way a normal person would, Noi tilts her head to the side and squints at him. 

“I can help with that, y’know,” she says after a moment, stepping closer and kicking aside a bloody chunk of scalp as she does. Her voice is a little bit different now. 

Shin knows this game by heart, and he knows that the middle of a murder scene is not the place to play it. Still, something about the squalid backdrop of this cut-rate syndicate’s hideout is making him feel reckless. This job was too easy, and it ended too soon, and now Shin’s not quite sure what to do with the leftover energy humming under his skin. 

Besides, that cut really is going to start stinging soon if he doesn’t let her do anything about it. 

“If you insist,” he says, voice carefully blank. He doesn’t move from his spot, but the words are all the invitation Noi needs to close the remaining distance between them. 

She smiles as she crowds him back against peeling wallpaper. It’s a smile just for him, a smile that makes him wonder all in a rush just who either of them think they’re fooling. She smells like blood and sweat, and he lets her press her thumb against his bottom lip before she pulls him closer by the chin, breathing smoke into his mouth. 

It’s nowhere near as much as the overwhelming clouds of it that she produces when someone gets seriously injured, but it feels just the same when Shin inhales. It always makes him dizzy for a second. 

Only when she squeezes his arm does he remember that the point of this is ostensibly for her to heal a superficial wound, not for him to take all of her smoke into his lungs. He stops breathing in after that, stops thinking, allows the world to narrow down to the way Noi’s mouth brushes against his as she exhales onto his wound. 

They sure do this a lot, for something that’s so endlessly frustrating. Shin has to clench his hand into a fist to stop himself from touching her, making this into something that it isn’t. 

After a few more seconds, Noi stops producing smoke. Shin’s lip is healed, but Noi still hasn’t taken her mouth away from his. 

This is part of the game too, and it’s the part that always brings Shin the closest to doing something he’d probably regret. These last few frozen moments always feel like a dare, the only one Noi’s ever given him that he doesn’t know if he can take. 

The moment passes, like it always does. Noi’s tongue darts out to lick her lips, so close to his that he can feel it, and then she steps back and aims a smile at him that’s so bright he can’t look at it directly. 

“Better?” 

Usually it’s easy for Shin to tell what she’s thinking, but now is the only time that she’s not an open book. 

“Yeah,” he says, a second too late to not sound distracted. To disguise it, he shakes out the garbage bag still crumpled up in his fist. With Noi at his side, he gets back to work.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! im on [tumblr](http://prismos.tumblr.com) and [twitter](http://twitter.com/spectrologist)!!


End file.
